The first time I saw MTV, it was in black-and-white. My dad had gotten a new job in Tallahassee and had rented a small one-bedroom apartment there to live in until the rest of the family could move up. I went to visit him one weekend and slept on the couch in the tiny living room. Staying up late one night, I turned on the little black-and-white TV that he had taken with him and was amazed to see this new channel, not available back in Gainesville yet, called MTV. Even in black-and-white, with the music playing through those tinny little speakers, the experience blew my mind.
I probably stayed up three hours that night just watching it. I quickly learned that every song MTV played had a synthesizer or three prominently featured. One of the best songs I heard that night was no exception—“Always Something There to Remind Me,” by the Naked Eyes. What a great song! It’s got one of the best synthesizer hooks of any new wave single. I still love it.
(Fun fact: Most people don’t know that the song is actually a cover of a Burt Bacharach number. Burt Bacharach! Most people today only know Bacharach from his cameo in Austin Powers, but oh well. It’s still pretty amazing.)
Sadly, the singer for the Naked Eyes, Pete Byrne, passed away last month. I thought I would feature his greatest hit as a meager kind of tribute.
This installment of my on-going Synchronicity for Bookworms series came about when I was re-reading one of the cherished novels of my childhood, Jack London’s White Fang. Many decades have passed since I last read the book, yet I have vivid memories of riding the school bus while engrossed in the story of the young Alaskan wolf who becomes the protagonist of London’s story. Note that I don’t call him the “hero” of the story; London’s literary school of Naturalism doesn’t really believe in heroes. But few have ever written so movingly about the physical and emotional plight of animals—including the most dangerous animals of all, human beings.
As I was reading the book this time, I was struck by this passage, in which London describes, from the point-of-view of the wolf-pup, what the inside of his cave is like. And how scary one bright “wall” of the cave is…
By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
For some reason, I focused on the phrase “a thousand thousand lives,” and I immediately wondered whether this were even roughly accurate. After all, a “thousand thousand” lives is a million lives. That seemed like a lot, even from an evolutionary standpoint.
So, I dialed up the Wikipedia page on wolves and found that the question really depends on what kind of “wolf” one is talking about. Gray wolves of the sort found in Alaska split off from the African wolf roughly one million years ago (mya) . If you include the African wolf or its predecessors, that takes you all the way back to 1.6 mya. Therefore, if you fudge a bit and replace the word “lives” in London’s passage with “generations,” you can properly say that little White Fang carries the genetic memory of one million ancestors inside him, at least.
Of course, wolves, like so many great mammalian lineages, first evolved in Africa. Specifically, they are descended from African jackals, having split off from the jackal line over two million years ago. Reading all this, I remembered something I learned in one of my anthropology classes in college—the so-called Out-of-Africa Theory in which modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have evolved in Africa and then migrated out to Europe and Asia. This new, improved, model of humanity soon displaced the human species in those lands such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on.
I did another web search on the “Out-of-Africa” theory and got a million hits for…Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Instead of staying on-course, I immediately went down this new rabbit-hole, hitting the Wikipedia page for the movie. I went to see it in the theaters at the time, but I have almost no memory of it. It is, in fact, one of the most forgettable films of the 1980s, the sort of big-budget, star-heavy drivel that Hollywood has been churning out for almost a century. I do remember that many people in the audience were crying at the tear-jerker ending, and that I wanted to cry, too, out of sheer boredom.
Naturally, the film went on to win seven Oscars that year.
In fact, I am being unfair. It’s not a bad movie. The cinematography is lavish. And the acting is brilliant (even though Robert Redford doesn’t even attempt a British accent for his real-life character, Denys Finch Hatton, probably because Pollack told him not to). Streep, in contrast, shows off her usual, preternatural ability with foreign accents, playing Swedish noblewoman Karen Blixen, on whose fabulous memoir (it’s great; you should read it) the film is based.
But the real standout of the film, for me—in fact, the film’s only actor whose scenes I actually remember—was German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who was a minor movie star at the time. I became a fan of Brandauer when I saw the movie Mephisto, in which he plays a conflicted Berlin actor who finally achieves fame when his most famous character (the devil in Faust) goes viral with the ascendent Nazi party. Brandauer also played a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again (another bit of drivel, but better than Out of Africa), in which he steals every scene.
I always liked Brandauer because he exuded the air of a blazing intellect, yet one that was tightly controlled. (Rather like Jack Nicholson, in fact, only German.) He was also just really, really charming and magnetic.
Unfortunately, Brandauer’s film career tapered off quite a bit after Out of Africa. You can imagine my surprise when I went up to IMDB, looked him up, and found that one of his more successful films of the 1990s was a Disney production of Jack London’s White Fang.
Yes, I had come full circle on the Great Synchronicity Wheel, returning to where I had begun. Only now, I knew a lot more about wolves, Jack London, Out of Africa, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
No, you are not hallucinating. I am, indeed, lapping myself in terms of Friday Night Rock-Outs. No “real” posts last week. The reason is simple: I’ve been on vacation, visiting family in Pass Christian with my son, Connor. We had a great time, and I did some work on my new novel. But no blogging. Oh, well.
So, I am going to just post another FNRO. This time, I’ve decided to feature one of the best live performances by one of the greatest bands ever. Namely, their performance at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. This was in 1983, when the band was on tour for their landmark album War, which is when the band began to achieve true superstardom.
In later years (up to and including today), U2 got a lot of hate for becoming a bit pompous and self-important on certain records. But they were—and still are—a great rock band, with a new album climbing the charts.
Their performance at Red Rocks was probably their best. Already a band known for grand gestures and almost militant power, they found themselves playing their hearts out to a full stadium.
“Only the Young” is one of those great songs whose history is so complicated that even fans can’t quite keep it straight. Originally written by Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry and Neal Schon of Journey, it was first released by the great pop-rock band Scandal in 1984, when the band was fronted by Patty Smyth. Journey then released their own recording of the song in 1985, which was featured on the soundtrack of the Matthew Modine movie Vision Quest. Taylor Swift has since done her own cover of the song, which is, naturally, the one most young people know today (if they know the song at all).
I have featured Journey on my Friday Night Rock-Out Series before with “Any Way You Want It.” In that post, I expressed the somewhat novel opinion that “Any Way You Want It” is Journey’s only “good” song. In retrospect, I see that that statement was unfair. “Only the Young” is, also, a very good song indeed. It somehow gets at the heart of the yearning and frustration that young people feel whenever the previous generation is doing its best to keep them down.
Such was the case in 1984, when young Gen-Xers like myself were in high school or college and doing their best to make it in the wake of the Baby Boomers. And it’s even more the case now, when Gen-Z is coming of age in a United States that has, almost literally, been looted by the old people who control it. They face young adulthood in a denuded world, bankrupt and barren of opportunity. I bet the song resonates for them, too.
My favorite version of the song is still the first one, by Scandal. Patty Smyth was one of the most underrated rock singers of her generation, and this song found her at the height of her powers. (Fun fact: Van Halen offered her the lead singer job after David Lee Roth left; she declined due to her pregnancy.) Her voice positively soars on this song, and whenever I hear it, I am transported back to that long-ago time—which, alas, is looking better by the day.
Well, it’s just one more day until my book becomes a Kindle Daily Deal on Amazon (the offer starts at midnight tonight, Pacific Standard Time). The next movie on my Great Movie Countdowns list is my favorite B-Movie of all time, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York(EFNY).
EFNY is probably the best example of a classic movie countdown because almost the entire movie is a countdown. War-hero turned bank-robber Snake Plissken has exactly twenty-four hours to find the President of the United States somewhere in the yawning, black hulk of Manhattan, now turned into an open-air prison by the U.S. government. If Snake doesn’t find the POTUS and get him out alive before time runs out, tiny explosives implanted in Snake’s neck will detonate, killing him instantly. Such is the deal made to him by the coldly practical Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (played by Lee Van Cleef in his greatest role since The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly): get the POTUS out alive and you’ll get a pardon. Otherwise, you’re dead.
So, armed to the teeth, Snake infiltrates the island and begins his desperate search. All the while, he keeps checking his special, way-cool digital watch, which looks exactly like a beefed-up version of the first Casio digital watch that me and all my friends had back in the day. The watch doesn’t tell time, of course—it’s a life-clock, counting down the hours, minutes, and seconds until Snake’s neck goes boom.
To make matters worse, there are many people in New York who feel that twenty-four hours is far too long for Snake to live. Chief among them is the Duke of New York, the sinister war-lord who controls the prison, played with great panache by the great musician Isaac Hayes, of “Shaft” fame.
Kurt Russell famously said that Snake is always just trying to live through “the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is.” Carpenter’s genius lies in filling every one of those “next minutes” with some new, compelling, and darkly magical moment of mayhem, all of which Snake must overcome in some unexpected and thrilling way.
The final chase scene where Snake and his companions race across the fictional 69th Street Bridge, dodging mines, with The Duke in hot pursuit is a classic. But my favorite moment in the film comes much earlier, when Snake, realizing he has almost no chance of finding the president, gets out his radio, calls Commissioner Hauk, and asks if he can just come out. “I’ll burn you off the wall,” Hauk coldly replies. At which point Snake looks at the radio and says, mostly to himself, “A little human compassion.”
Snake does, in fact, find that little bit of “human compassion” in the course of the movie, when he makes some new friends who help him escape. More importantly, he finds it in himself, too. But that doesn’t stop him from being a bad-ass.
“Will the Wolf Survive” by Los Lobos came out just a few years before I moved to Arizona for a few years. And so, finding myself living forty-five miles from the Mexican border, the song really resonated with me. I saw a lot of very poor immigrant people doing very hard menial jobs. I drove through countless immigration checkpoints in Texas. I saw the two Americas.
The real reason I love the song, though, is that…well…it rocks. East L.A. style. I love David Hidalgo’s soulful voice, and Cesar Rosas’s lead guitar work fires on all cylinders.
Also, the song seems particularly poignant at the moment, here in America, with all the persecution going on. Same old, same old. Just more of it.
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, America’s birthday. So, for tonight’s Friday Night Rock-Out, I was going to share Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which is my favorite “patriotic” song ever. I love it because the narrator seems genuinely proud to be an American while at the same time lamenting our country’s many, many flaws.
But, at the last minute, I decided to go with another great “heartland rock” singer—and one of my favorite artists of all time, generally—John Mellencamp, and his dark ode “Paper in Fire.” The song is about Mellencamp’s heritage, tracing back to a long line of tough, angry, and sometimes violent men. Which, in a way, describes America itself. Violence and anger are woven through our nation’s history, all 250 years of it. Maybe even further back than that.
Despite the song’s heavy themes, though, there is something thrilling and fun about it. Inspiring, even. I really like the way it evokes Kentucky as much as Kansas, with its blend of rock, bluegrass, and gospel.
So, if you live near a theater that sometimes shows re-releases of classic films, keep your eye it. It’s a great film, and everyone should get a chance to see it on the big screen (as I did, lo those forty years ago).
Once again, I have the great library district of Alachua County to thank for my latest classic sci-fi book cover post. I was browsing through the library’s website, looking at their most recent e-book purchases, when I stumbled upon this oldie by famed sci-fi author Robert Silverberg. I don’t know how exactly, but I never read Silverberg before. I had heard of him, of course. I knew that he was a famous sci-fi author (he’s actually still with us, at 91, as of this writing), often lumped in with the New Wave that emerged in the 1960s.
Having read one book by him now, I must say that he feels more like a Golden Age writer to me. The Man in the Maze, after all, has not one but two brilliant, highly educated yet macho heroes (alaHeinlein) who live in a Buck-Rogers-style galactic civilization of the future (alaAsimov), where they are very successful with the hot babes of many, far-flung planets.
Still, this book has a lot more character depth and thematic complexity then the average sci-fi tale, then or now. In fact, it’s clever as hell. I mean, how many other sci-fi works are based on an ancient Greek play? Specifically, this one is a retelling of Sophocles’ drama Philoctetes, in which the titular hero, a great archer and warrior of the Achaeans, is wounded early in the Trojan war. His wound is of a supernatural origin—literally a curse from the Gods—and will not heal. It also stinks to high-heaven, so much so that the other Achaean Greeks dump him on an island called Lemnos, where he stews in his own self-pity and growing hatred of all humankind.
Silverberg cleverly transposes the tail to a far-future civilization, where interplanetary diplomat Dick Muller is similarly afflicted after completing a mission to a newly discovered planet, Beta Hydri IV. During his visit, the Beta Hydrians bestow upon him the “gift” of telepathy. Unfortunately, the kind they give him only works one way, outward. When he returns to human-occupied space, he is horrified to learn that his innermost and darkest thoughts, fears, and impulses are constantly transmitted to those around, to the point that people literally run away.
Basically, he stinks. In despair, he exiles himself to a bizarre planet (called Lemnos, naturally) which was abandoned millions of years earlier by a highly intelligent but now extinct race. All that remains of their civilization is a huge, diabolical maze, filled with automated traps and snares that kill virtually everyone who goes into it. Except Mueller, that is, who finds his way to the center and takes up residence there.
All this occurs before the main action of the novel, when, as in the original Sophocles drama, Muller’s old friends soon realize that they desperately need the forsaken man to save them from a new crisis. In the play, the Achaeans learn via prophecy that only Philoctetes, with his awesome archery skills, can secure the final victory over Troy. In the novel, Muller’s old friend, Charles Boardman (the guy who sent him to Beta Hydri IV) seeks his help in dealing with yet another alien civilization, this one threatening to enslave all humanity.
I really like this cover from the 1987 Avon edition because it feels like a great, archetype 1980s cover. Done by master illustrator Jim Burns, it has the photorealistic, industrial style that was typical of that era, the age before digital art was even a dream. (It feels a lot like a Syd Mead work actually.) It’s also got a strangely muted scene, with a rugged-looking man—Charles Boardman, presumably—sitting in the cockpit of a starship while a younger comrade—Ned Rawlins, presumably, whom Boardman convinces to venture into the maze and befriend Muller, in hopes of gulling him into coming with them back to civilization. And behind Rawlins, of course, is the insane, sci-fi maze of Lemnos.
It’s a really fun book. Kind of a precursor to The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner and lots of other, later yarns. Check it out…
I’ve been thinking about this song a lot lately, and GEE, I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY.
Yes, it’s about the dark side of American culture. Conspiracy theories and paranoia and madness. Specifically, when he wrote the song, Tom Cochrane was worried about a new wave of antisemitism that was on the rise in the country. That was in 1981. FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.
I still love this song. Listening to it feels like driving across the desert of Southern Arizona on a two-lane highway at 3:00 A.M. (something I’ve done, actually, although this song did not come on the radio).
It’s also an example of how an offbeat, unusual choice can elevate an already fine work of art. In this case, it was the use of a steel guitar—an instrument normally associated with country music—played by master musician Ken Greer that gives the song its eerie, haunting sound.
